number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Brian C. Anderson

articles

AMERICA and Europe, or at least the nations of “old” western Europe, have been increasingly at odds since the end of the Cold War. Even a casual observer can see this in the rampant anti-Americanism on the continent. The hostility manifests itself with particular force among elites: The European Union deputy and French political scientist Olivier Duhamel, to take just one example, recently described the United States as a “degenerate” democracy—an irrational nation and a threat to global order. A recent poll ranked the American “hyperpower” second only to Israel as the greatest danger to world peace. Political relations between the United States and Europe have become so chilly that France and Germany openly worked to undercut their long-time ally in the run up to war in Iraq.

AFTER the liberal philosopher John Rawls died of heart failure at the age of 81 last November, obituaries and remembrances in prominent places testified to the man’s greatness as a thinker. The New York Times led the way, publishing three notices of Rawls’s passing: an obituary declaring that he “gave new meaning and resonance to the concepts of justice and liberalism”; a “Week in Review” piece arguing that he provided “intellectual spine to liberals seeking tough-minded defense of their instinct to take from the rich and give to the poor”; and a lengthy op-ed by Martha Nussbaum, who called him “the most distinguished philosopher of the twentieth century.” The Times’s counterpart in England, the Guardian, asserted that Rawls “rejuvenated and transformed the study of political philosophy.” Rawls’s Harvard colleague (and critic) Michael Sandel, writing for the New Republic, bordered on the reverential. Sandel recalled the phone call he received from Rawls upon first arriving at Harvard as a young professor: “This is John Rawls, R-A-W-L-S.” For Sandel, “It was as if God himself had called to invite me to lunch and spelled his name just in case I didn’t know who he was.”

OF the major political thinkers of his generation—including Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott, and Leo Strauss—Bertrand de Jouvenel suffers from relative neglect. During the 1950s and 1960s, the French philosopher and political economist enjoyed a considerable reputation in the English-speaking world. He lectured as a visiting professor at Yale and the University of California-Berkeley, and his books garnered serious reviews in prestigious journals. But by the time of his death in 1987, his star had dimmed. Read through a span of recent political-theory journals and you will rarely encounter his name.

IN his highly influential book, Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault indicted tile modern West for its treatment of the “insane.” According to Foucault, Western societies, bowing before the Enlightenment idol of Reason, built a theoretical and institutional quarantine against madness. The Cartesian rational mind must not suffer from exposure to irrationality; the madman must not roam freely through town and country as he did during the Middle Ages, a mocking reminder of human mortality and God’s infinite wisdom. Instead, Foucault claimed, the insane were thrown into cells with other dissidents from the rising bourgeois moral order—the poor, the criminal, and the licentious. The supposed liberation of the mad during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by “alienists” Phillippe Pinel in France and William Tuke in England, he argued, only furthered their exclusion. These reformers herded the mad into asylums, where an arid “science” of psychiatry silenced their Dionysian voices. Enlightenment, Foucault held, was bought at the cost of excluding the mad: Such was the heavy price of Reason’s “progress.”

SINCE it first arrived three centuries ago, the modern state has relentlessly sought to increase both its knowledge and power. It has defined borders, assigned surnames, applied science to nature, determined standard units of measurement, and counted, counted, and counted yet again. And, as all but the most romantic antimodern will admit, the modern state has brought with it many goods: political liberty, widespread education, dramatic improvements in health, and, through the dazzling inventiveness it has made possible, relief from toil and drudgery. But the modern state has also been the deadliest of man’s enemies, and at no time more so than in the twentieth century—perhaps the bloodiest in human history. We will never know the exact number of men, women, and children killed by the state in this century, but it surely exceeds 150 million.